4 ms·
> I know it's buried deep, but it's kind of weird for the reporting to not even show an image of the area? It’s something I have seen becoming the norm nowaday
by teddyh 3y ago
> I know it's buried deep, but it's kind of weird for the reporting to not even show an image of the area?
It’s something I have seen becoming the norm nowadays. Articles about art or photographs without a single image. Political articles about borders without a single map. Articles about some thing some scientist has done, maybe with a picture of the scientist, but not of the actual thing. And it’s not a technical limitation of the medium; most articles will have numerous (but irrelevant) images.
I suspect that SEO measurement has told people that it doesn’t matter what images an article has, as long as it has some images, optimally interspersed with the text. Spending any money on getting relevant images thus becomes an unnecessary expense. Readers will still click on the article (because of the click-bait headline), and will still read (or at least scroll through) the article if the text is broken up by images by an optimal amount.
- fragmede 3y agoI think you're right. We know ChatGPT-4 can do image analysis, so all Google has to do is say that they're down ranking articles that don't have relevant images, and we'll be back to having useful images in artichokes again.
- fragmede 3y agotoo late to edit, but -2? if there's feedback for me on why, I'm all ears! (also, lol artichokes. ducking autocorrect.)
- CamperBob2 3y agoCould be as simple as the fact that images make the page take longer to load. Google penalizes that, as I understand it.
- dotancohen 3y agoPerhaps putting a relevant image on the page quickly satisfies the users, so they click off the page quickly. But _not_ putting a relevant image on the page makes the user scroll more and stay longer, thus exposing all the advertisements and increasing engagement and retention metrics.
- djbusby 3y agoKPIs and A/B testing led to this. But those manager KPIs are directly against user-interest. Which managers measure user-happiness?
- dotancohen 3y agoThere is no Javascript API for to measure user-happiness.
- strken 3y agoResearchers often obscure the location of sites on purpose so that tourists and vandals don't show up and damage them. They'll share better photos and maps in person, but not anywhere that the public can see. This probably applies more to something like the archaeological and geological digs at Lake Mungo than a 520km-wide buried crater, but there can be a "better safe than sorry" attitude in the field.